The house smells like a winery.

Currently we are fermenting, thus the title of this post.

This year we tried to take control of the temperature of the ferment.  In the past we think it was too cool.  A hotter ferment will be faster and theoretically it will lend to more extraction.  The Syrah from last year was pretty light colored when all was said and done.  We want this to be a bolder Bordeaux style wine.

To get this hotter ferment, we had to find a smaller space where we could manipulate the temperature.  I'm not going to crank the heat up to 75 in the entire house.  So what better spot to use than my wine closet?  Before:

Before.

After.

Currently

Yes, that is a heater in the upper left of your picture.  This is the fermenting room.  It is working quite well, the temperature of the must is on day 3 of Ferment 2012 is hovering around 25C (77F).  We have this fancy pH meter that measure the pH and the temperature.

In addition to the hotter ferment, to make a more robust and full wine we also used a technique that I am sure has a fancy name.  But what I did was pull six gallons of juice out of the must before we fermented.  This leaves a more concentrated end product.  By pulling juice out of the must it concentrates the remaining juice by keeping all the skins for more extraction.  Actually separating that much juice out of the must is a lot easier to do in theory than in practice.  But in the end we will also have around 5 gallons of Rose hopefully ready to go for next summer and a more concentrated main blend.

5 gallon and 1 gallon carboys of Rose wine.

That is all for now.  Currently I am punching the cap down three times a day. 8 AM, 4 PM and Midnight.  This prevents the grape skins that form on the surface of the fermenting wine to become hard and dried out and potentially forming a cap that limits the amount of oxygen getting to the fermenting wine.  The Rose I just agitate every time I punch the cap.

edit: Today we added the second dose of fermaid.  It's this little clay looking powder that is basically like crack for the yeast.  It makes sure the fermentation doesn't get stuck by giving the yeast something to eat.  We only went with a half dose because I just measured the fermenting wine and our brix is down to 12.5 from an original of 24.  That means we are about 50% of the fermentation done.  Ideally we would have added the second dose of fermaid one third into fermentation.  Apparently the fermaid is like crack to not only the yeast but other things as well if it doesn't get used up by the yeast.  So over dosing could be very very bad.